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COPYRIGHT: PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH BEFORE CONTINUING!

All photos in this Blogspot and those accessed in Google Images via the links in each report are my Copyright and may be saved for personal use only. They may not be republished elsewhere without the written permission of the Copyright holder.

Hello and welcome to my twice reinstated and updated photo reports of visits to narrow gauge model railway layouts and events! Following the sudden and untimely cessation of Fotopic in March 2011 and with it the loss of my photo galleries, I started this blog in order to try to keep my "Roving Reports" available to those who enjoy viewing them. I have linked this blogsite to the old galleries which I originally rebuilt and posted in albums in Picasaweb Once all the old reports had been rebuilt, I have continued to add completely new ones to cover my visits to events from April 2011 onwards.

In August 2016 Google very kindly and arbitrarily blocked access to Picasaweb in order to force everyone to use their "much better" Google Images, so I had to do the whole exercise again. Thanks! Google Images is certainly much easier to view, but to upload to - well try it yourself, I have made my own judgement and it isn't a very complimentary one, so the long term future of this blog remains in doubt.

Meanwhile......Because of the way this Blogspot works, the most recent postings appear first and the oldest ones last. Each report contains a link to the Google Images photo album plus captions for that report. The link will take you to the front page of the Google Images Album for this report. Left click on the first photo and it will open into a manually operated slideshow. A panel should open alongside the image on the right showing the number of the photo and the caption text. If it does not appear, click on the small white disk top right of the photo panel and it will open. On albums created before August 2016 which were created originally in Picasaweb, these are now in the Google Image Archive and the caption panel has to be opened manually for each image. I apologise for this, blame Google!

More recent albums created in Google Images keep the panel open.

in both cases, move forward or backwards by clicking the right or left arrows on your keyboard. When you have finished viewing, click the back arrow showing top left of the photo panel and this will take you back to the album opening page.

Close it in the normal way by clicking on the "X" top right or click the return arrow top left of the Windows screen to return to the blog, depending on which browser you use.

In Google Chrome you should click on the X and then select the tab for the blog from the windows tabs, in Internet explorer, click on the return arrow top left of the window to return to the blog. I'm afraid I don't know how other browsers such as Firefox vary in their operation.

Once back in the blog, any report can be accessed sequentially from the blog by scrolling downwards and if required, click on the "older posts" link at the bottom of the list, or simply go to the Blog Archive on the right of the window and select any report by simply clicking on the title.

Sunday, 11 September 2016

On the road again, this time to a small community hall in
Water Orton, in the eastern outskirts of Birmingham,
just off the M42/M6 junction and a few miles north of the NEC. The reason?
Simple really, it was time again for the biennial 009 Society West Midlands
Group open day, otherwise known as Narrow Gauge Midlands and an event not to be
missed if you can possibly help it, as around 150 other like-minded enthusiasts
attested as I joined “the gang” for another warm and friendly day amongst top
quality people and models, refreshed by the customary 5 star service from the
renowned Webb Family and friends Catering Corps who raised £270 during the day
for the Woodland Trust. The West Midlands Group are an active and enthusiastic
group of narrow gauge modellers who always provide a good presentation at the
many events in the that they provide a presence and 009 Society
publicity. Great to see them on home territory with their own and invited
friends layouts.

PLEASE NOTE: This is the first album I have created using Google Images, which the nice people at Google have decided to replace the perfectly serviceable and user friendly Picasa Web Albums with, as apparently this is the way forward. To say it was not very easy is an understatement. Uploading the album was very straightforward, trouble is that no matter how I tried, the photos would not upload in the order that I wanted them to, so in the end, I was reduced to manually re-ordering each one of the 101 photos in this album! Swear box filled up rapidly and it took ages. Got there in the end, but then had to add the captions! In Picasa Web, there is/was a facility to add captions to the album and you simply copy and paste each caption from a Word document against each photo number that comes up in this facility. With Google Images, I had to open each photo and insert the caption, then move to the next photo and do it again and so on. It seems that the choices are to persevere with albums and order the photos in this way, or to upload each photo to a new album individually which I will probably try for the next one.

Anyway, that's my excuse for the longer than desired delay for this album.

Navigating the album: When you "click to view" you will/should be taken to the album which will start off with the opening text, same as the one in this blog entry, then you will see the thumbnails of the photos. Start with the first one by left-clicking it and it should open up with the caption showing in a pane to the right of the photo. If it is not there, then click on the little "i" button top right and this will open the info pane. To move to the next photo, simply press the right arrow key on your keyboard, the one between the letters and the number pad to the right of the space and right hand ctrl etc keys!

I hope you find the album satisfactory and the navigation works as described above.